Thursday, February 3, 2011

Short Sharp Science: Laser blasts sunlight protein into view: "To create this image, researchers led by Henry Chapman of the Centre for Free-Electron Laser Science at the German national laboratory DESY sprayed 15,000 nanocrystals of the protein into the path of the Linac Coherent Light Source, an X-ray laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.

Powerful laser pulses vaporised the nanocrystals almost instantly, but not before the crystals had scattered X-rays, producing diffraction patterns that could be combined to render the crystal's detailed structure in three dimensions."